An IP network may provide more types of services, such as multimedia call, file downloading, and web page browsing, and therefore the network needs to be capable of detecting different service streams and measuring and reporting charging information such as traffic volume and duration to the charging center. Organizations such as 3GPP and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, WiMAX for short) forum have defined policy and charging control based on a policy charging control (Policy Charging Control, PCC for short) architecture. The PCC architecture allows a network to detect different service streams and meet requirements such as quality of service (QoS) control and charging measurement for service streams.
The PCC architecture includes functional entities such as a policy charging enforcement function (Policy Charging Enforcement Function, PCEF for short) and a policy charging rules function (Policy Charging Rules Function, PCRF for short). The PCEF supports interception for a single service stream, a group of service streams, or all service streams in a session. The PCRF supports usage amount management based on the rule level and session level, and may dynamically control bandwidth or charging rules by using the usage amount reported by the PCEF. A Gx interface is used between the PCRF and the PCEF for policy delivery and usage amount reporting: The PCEF requests the PCRF for PCC rules through the GX interface, the PCRF provides PCC rules for the PCEF through the GX interface, and the PCEF reports a service usage amount monitored according to the PCC rules to the PCRF through the GX interface.
However, the existing usage amount monitoring mechanism cannot meet the following requirements: For example, the usage amount of a specific website such as www.sina.com needs to be intercepted, and at the same time all HTTP protocol usage amounts of users in a session need to be further intercepted so as to control the quality of service when the access volume of Sina reaches a certain threshold and to control the quality of service of the specific website when the HTTP service reaches a certain threshold. If the rule level monitoring is used, the PCEF only preferably accumulates the service stream of www.sina.com to a certain rule during identification, and the usage amount for the service stream is reported to the rule corresponding to the HTTP protocol or to the rule corresponding to www.sina.com. In this way, the usage amount for another rule is not the complete usage amount. If session level monitoring is used, as session level monitoring is aimed for monitoring all service usage amounts of users in a session, service streams of users in the session accessing any website by using any protocol are accumulated to a rule and reported to the PCRF. As such, the usage amount of users accessing www.sina.com cannot be distinguished from the usage amount by using the HTTP protocol. Therefore, currently the service usage amount reported by the PCEF to the PCRF is not accurate, resulting in failure to accurately control the quality of service for other services subsequently.